Mary Eberstadt on Irving Kristol.

You’ll want to read it all, but here is some of it:

To write about Irving Kristol without understanding either his ineradicable respect for religion or his liberal sense of humor is like trying to describe food without tasting or smelling it. Facts not always being stubborn things, many self-appointed critics of neoconservatism have nonetheless done just that in absurdly offering up the portrait of a godless neoconservative ideologue. Even so, one suspects another, deeper reason for why certain detractors have failed to give Irving his literary due: their resentment of his longstanding and resolutely unapologetic attack on the counterculture and its legacy.
This is the Irving whom critics have truly wanted to hate: Irving the social conservative. As he put it in one 1993 essay that made waves called “My Cold War,” what saddened him above all were “the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society–a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. . . . It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers.” Today, of course, many on the right as well as the left would drive social conservatives from the fold if they could. How quickly they have forgotten just which opinion writers consistently delivered the sharpest and most knowing critiques of modern morals during the past several decades–Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and other prominent neoconservatives. Social conservatism itself has been a bigger tent than is typically appreciated.